


Broken and Bonkers

by JuweWright



Series: 30 for 30 [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Friendship/Love, Hogwarts Eighth Year, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-19 00:13:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13692783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JuweWright/pseuds/JuweWright
Summary: Draco Malfoy has a bad time in 8th year. One day, help comes from an unexpected side.





	Broken and Bonkers

**Author's Note:**

> The "30 for 30" challenge is something I am doing for my upcoming 30th birthday. I asked people for prompts and am writing 30 short fanfics for 30 people. 
> 
> This one was a request bei T.S. on Facebook (It'd be super if you could let me know your alias, so I can gift this to you properly):
> 
> "Druna! Year 8? Maybe she helps him deal and he's absolutely baffled and in awe of her"

Draco couldn’t stand it any more. Every day he got out of bed. Every day he went to class. Every day he pretended not to notice how they watched him. He pretended not to hear the whispered slurs even though his ears picked up all of them. They pierced through his skin, which wasn’t as thick as it should have been, and pierced his heart: Tiny, venomous spears of hatred.

“A Malfoy doesn’t cry” his father had always said. 

Well, his father was far away now. Locked up in some cell in Azkaban. And Draco Malfoy _ did  _ cry, albeit he made sure to do it in secret. He would not give them the satisfaction of knowing how their behaviour got to him. Outside, he was the ice-prince, cold, aloof and still the product of his noble upbringing. There was nothing left of his heirloom except for these behaviour-patterns.The Mansion had been sacked by the Ministry. His mother lived in a flat in a dingy street in London. There were investigations going on to determine what would happen to their wealth and it was almost sure that they’d not be allowed to keep most of it. As Blaise put it: “Nobility my ass, we’ll actually have to work to make a living.”

Blaise was the only person that still treated Draco the same way he had always treated him. The Slytherins had used to worship him when they saw him as their direct link to the Dark Lord. Now, they were embarrassed to know him, ashamed to be acquainted with one of the boys carrying the Dark Mark. Some of them just left the room quietly and quickly when he entered. Others made a show out of despising him, spat out onto the floor and made sure his robe never touched any of their stuff, making sure that everyone around them was well aware of the fact that they shunned the boy who had once been a Death Eater, that they were better than him. Pansy, the rat, had decided snogging Ronald Weasley was a good way to redeem herself  in the eyes of the public. Sometimes that was the worst bit: Seeing his former girlfriend hand in hand with the boy who led the anti-Malfoy-war. King Weasley, the only one of the Golden Trio who had come back to Hogwarts, strolled through the castle as if he owned it and made a big show out of putting Slytherins and “Death Eater Scum” in their place. Draco shouldn’t have given two hoots about anything the Weasel said, but Ron wasn’t the dumb Harry Potter sidekick any more. He had followers, who drank up every word he uttered - be it ever so devoid of any intelligence. 

Draco usually made it through a week without breaking down. A week was good. Sometimes it was less than a week. Sometimes, it wasn’t even a day. He had found his hiding-place in the restored bathroom on the third floor. Apart from Moaning Myrtle, who still lived there unperturbed and seemed to be quite fond of his company of late, nobody ever came there. So when the door was opened that afternoon, when he’d just curled up sobbing in the nook under the window to hate and pity himself, Draco was quite surprised. 

Looking up he first saw a pair of pink Sneakers, further up, the usual school-uniform stockings, rolled down on one leg and pulled up on the other. He frowned. A skirt, a cardigan, a bunch of dirty blond hair and a strange butterbeer-cork-necklace. Merlin’s striped pants! What hellish entity had sent Luna Lovegood his way?

“Hello Draco” she said calmly, as if she had been expecting to find him here, as if it weren’t an unusual sight at all to see the Slytherin prince all teared up and blotchy huddled in a corner.

“Go away!” he hissed with as much venom in his voice as he could muster.

Luna shook her head and instead of turning around and leaving, she waved her wand to lock the door from the inside before sitting down on the floor three feet away from him.

“I’ve seen you go in here often” she said. “You never looked happy. And today I heard what Ronald Weasley and Seamus Finnegan said to you. It wasn’t nice.”

She wrinkled her nose thoughtfully.

“It wasn’t nice at all.”

For a while they just sat in silence, then Luna picked up the conversation again.

“Why do they say all these nasty things to you? They called you a murderer. You are not a murderer. You didn’t kill anyone.”

Draco shrugged.

“You never tell them they are lying when they say things like this. You never try to stand up to them. You pretend you don’t listen. But you listen. You hear every word they say. And they hurt you. I can see that they hurt you.”

He looked up and met her eyes. She looked genuinely concerned. It was baffling. She had been part of Dumbledore’s Army, part of Potter’s friends. She should have been one of Weasley’s cronies. Yet, she seemed completely unbiased. 

She was also one of the ones who had come back to finish school - Potter and Granger had stayed out of Hogwarts, not wanting the ‘Golden Trio’ fame following their every step. A year younger than her mates, Luna had decided not to repeat her sixth year but to skip ahead to 7th year and directly try out for her N.E.W.T.s. From what he had heard and seen, she was bloody brilliant in charms and transfiguration, but a mess in potions. Her record in exploded kettles almost equalled Finnegan’s. Potion making was a task that needed total focus and Luna Lovegood was much too easily distracted by the weirdest things to ever reach that kind of concentration. If the recipe said “stir five times clockwise” she’d stir two times, then notice a spider crawling by and watch the animal until it vanished under a bookshelf. By then she’d have forgotten that she had not stirred the potion enough and would continue with the next task. Draco had slipped her a note from time to time during class when he saw her get the ingredients wrong yet again. She had never said much, just nodded and then used the right ingredients, finishing with a potion that might not have the intended effect but did not blow up the dungeons either.

“If I talk back, it will get nasty” Draco said. “They won’t let me argue. They’ll just beat me up and that’s that. They’d probably not even get detention for it. Beating up a former Death Eater counts as a good deed for most of our teachers.”

He sighed, trying to stop the tears from welling up again.

“And they are completely right. Why shouldn’t they hate me for what I did, for who I am? There’s not a second that goes by in which I don’t hate myself.”

Luna shuddered and shook her head, then suddenly crawled over to him. He tried to push her away but her gentle arms still found a way to pull him into a hug. Draco Malfoy, crying on Luna Lovegood’s shoulder. Well that was something unexpected.

It had been the first hug he had been given in a long time though, the first genuine hug that was not a thinly veiled threat or a symbol of ownership. Luna seemed a little clumsy, as if she didn’t usually hug people. Draco remembered that she used to be a loner. Her odd jewellery and the fact that she took all the stuff her dad published in the Quibbler seriously had not made her popular. 

“You shouldn’t hate yourself” she said thoughtfully. “In the end you are who you are and if you are not who you want to be, you can just be someone else. People are allowed to change, to progress. But you are not a terrible person, Draco. And you are definitely not a murderer. That’s just a blatant lie and somebody should kick Ron where it hurts for making half of the school believe that crap.”

Draco chuckled when he imagined the willowy Luna deliver some serious martial arts action to Ron Weasley. 

“See. That’s better”, she said and pulled out a paper tissue so he could wipe away his tears and blow his nose.

Again, silence fell between them. Again, it was Luna who broke it.

“You should know, you are not alone” she said, taking his hand in hers. Her fingers were tiny, slender and cold.  “I always felt alone. I was always the weird girl, the one that nobody wanted to be friends with. I cried sometimes, because I felt so alone I even told my dad I wished I was different. And then he cried. Because I am like my mum and I remind him of her and it was terrible for him to notice I wanted to be someone else. And then I met Harry and he was nice and I bet he thought I was weird, but he didn’t care. I know you didn’t always make the right choices, Draco. But I don’t care either. You were pulled into this. And you are not a Death Eater, you never were, even if you have the Mark. You are Draco Malfoy, you are good at potions, you like Quidditch, you are a bit arrogant and you made some horrendously bad choices in your life but you are not a bad person and you should be allowed to make new choices, different choices.”

She stood up with a fluid motion and smiled.

  
“It’s dinner time. Let’s go see if there’s pudding.”

Draco stared at her. How was this girl even possible? 

“Yeah”, he said slowly. “Yeah I guess we should go to dinner.”

She did not turn and leave then, though. Did she truly expect him to come with her? Walk down the corridors of the castle with her? She’d feel the same gazes upon her that always followed him. She’d be judged and scrutinized for this. 

“What? Are you coming?” she asked. “Or have the Nargles got your brain? You look befuddled.”

He shook his head.

“You have no clue what you’re getting yourself into” he murmured.

She shrugged and held out a hand, pulling him off the floor.

“I’m not getting myself into anything. I am going to have dinner. And hopefully pudding. And I am making sure you have dinner and pudding as well, because if your mum saw you these days she’d be awfully shocked by how thin you’ve become. I have noticed you’re skipping meals all the time. You know that starving yourself to death is a really bad idea, don’t you? It’s a horrible way to die.”

She delivered this speech with a nonchalance that almost made Draco chuckle. He had never talked much to Luna before. Even though she was pure blood, their circles were vastly different. She was rather plebeian and Lucius Malfoy had only ever sneered at Xenophilius and his family. Their paths had crossed a couple of times but until they had both come back to Hogwarts to complete their education, they had never had much common ground. She was much tougher than he had expected with a dark humour that very much resounded with his own.

“All right. If you insist.” he said, tucking in his shirt, straightening his tie in front of the mirrors and making sure he didn’t look like he had just had a medium-sized nervous breakdown. “Welcome to the lion’s den!”

Luna grinned, opened the door with a quick “Alohomora” and took his hand again before pulling him into the corridor.

“You know the funny thing about lions” she said, squeezing his fingers lightly. “They are only big pussycats. And they are afraid of snakes.”

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> I hope I did Luna justice in this one. I don't write her often, but I love her to bits.


End file.
